Music

Being a part-time live musician, I've been pondering about how AI would disrupt creative/entertainment industries where the business model mainly hinges on the value of media transmitted and replayed, pre-recorded or not.  The recording industry was the first to be hit; DRM is keeping it on life support but it seems like a matter of time until even that gets breached.  Online performance still holds value, but AI will soon disrupt that as well (think MAVE).  In-person live performance will probably be the last to hold, and I used to think it would be the way for us live musicians to go, but now it seems that advancements in robotics will probably breach that as well—my personal guess is in about 10 years. (con't)

AI's lack of ability to self-curate on higher order is probably still keeping its proliferation in check.  This is a different game, guided by the mass audience's feedback.  Current generation of mission-specific AI has human-guided heuristics built in, but from what I see, people's taste changes faster than they can be captured, so manual curation and codification has its limits.

To me, the endgame question, thus, seems to be: "Will AI be able to replicate the human's creative process at its fundamental level?"  At least to me—having attempted to delve into creative industry myself—a large part of that process is pure serendipity.  Maybe it's just a stochastic process, I don't know; if it is, then human's role in that endgame is to see if what AIs have "serendipitously" created actually clicks with them, as human taste and appreciation, I guess, is yet another level of black box, and I guess—or naively hope, I don't know—that it's the last bastion.

The fundamental issue is that the current form of AI is uncannily good at capturing and mass-reproducing human-created styles of art.  AI does, however, seem to have difficulties in outpacing human creativity.  I've been keeping eyes on Suno AI outputs as well as AI-generated images on DeviantArt and Pixiv for quite some time; past the initial shock and awe, people do seem to realize that AI is not going to inundate them with massive amount of creativity, just massive amount of outputs.